MEDIA - 000 - Global health performance monitor counter

Microsoft Lync Server 2010 includes a range of performance monitor counters showing the health and performance of the system. One of the counters is MEDIA – 000 – Global health counter in the group LS:MEDIA – 00 – Operations. The counter indicates the Global health of the media stack and it can take 5 values: 0 means DISABLED, 1 is NORMAL, 2 is LIGHTLOAD, 3 is HEAVYLOAD and 4 is OVERLOADED. However recently someone reported that they were seeing a value of 6 for this counter. I checked on my system and I saw the value 7. What was going on?

It turns out that counter I saw as 7 was the _Total counter. This counter shows the number of media stack instances on the server. On my server I had 7 instances running as you can see on the screenshot below. Each one of those counters were 1, which means the load was normal.